Report on ICOT

Mark E. Stickel
June 9, 1992

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The inception of ICOT was accompanied by great expectations. ICOT certainly 
failed to solve "the AI problem" and thus be viewed as an unqualified success by the 
world press. But neither has anyone else, and ICOT has contributed as much as other 
research centers. In its research approach, ICOT was always willing to build things: 
applications, languages, operating systems, processors, multiprocessors. They did not 
restrict themselves to developing paper theories, but realized them in hardware and 
software. Implementation is a good test of value of ideas, and I think ICOT's willing-
ness to experiment with the technologies they devised is very healthy. 

I hope that ICOT continues. Establishing a research center with an international 
reputation is no small task. The investment to develop the research center, to establish 
a core of researchers and managers, a set of operating procedures, and a culture, has 
been made and should be preserved. The PIM multiprocessors have only recently been 
completed, so there has been little opportunity to experiment with or evaluate them 
yet. More effort is required to propagate ICOT's ideas and software to the world. 


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